What Helps Us Stay Human
The Meeting Shore
Blue, green, and cream gather like seafoam, stone, sky, and wind in conversation. Adorned with a feathered fly and drifted branch, this piece carries the wild harmony of a rugged coast where all elements meet and none stand alone.
Their Blessing ~
May all that feels separate within you find meeting ground.
May sea, stone, sky, and breath remember their union in your body.
Over these last months, I’ve written about legacy, staying, nonviolence, and living amidst dissonance. Lately another question has been with me: How do we speak of what remains sacred in us while so much sacred life is being violated in the world?
I write this from relative safety. Warmth. Shelter. Food. Enough quiet to reflect. I do not take that for granted. And still, many are living under conditions no nervous system should have to endure.
War.
Displacement.
Captivity.
Violation.
Fear as atmosphere.
Loss beyond language.
Families trying to survive what should never have been asked of them. Girls carrying what no child should have to carry. Bodies and futures treated as expendable. Some days it is hard to reconcile the ordinary comforts of my life with the extraordinary suffering unfolding elsewhere. How am I here, and that is happening? I do not have a clean answer.
What I do know is that I do not want spirituality that turns away. I do not want healing language that exists only for the insulated. I do not want inner peace purchased through forgetting one another. And yet, I also do not believe despair is the only honest response.
So I return again to the question: What is there within us, whether in comfort or in need, that cannot be harmed?
Not as abstraction.
Not as privilege.
Not as a way to avoid reality.
But as a necessary inquiry in times of pervasive dehumanization.
Perhaps remembering what cannot be harmed is not a private luxury, but part of how we resist becoming numb. Perhaps there is something in us no system can fully own. A dignity deeper than propaganda. A tenderness deeper than brutality. A sacredness deeper than what has been done. A humanity that survives even where conditions try to erase it.
Remembering that there is something sacred in me has brought relief. Because when fear becomes constant, it helps me to remember I am more than fear. When grief rises, it helps me remember grief is not the whole story. When systems try to reduce life to numbers, status, productivity, obedience, or consumption, it helps me remember that being, being in and of itself, carries worth.
For me, this remembering has come through ancestral healing, through relationship with those who came before me, through sensing lineages older than modern life. At times it has come through nature, through prayer, through music, through stillness, through the quiet feeling that life is larger than the current moment.
These paths may not be everyone’s language.
That is okay.
What matters most is not the form. What matters is finding what helps us stay human. What helps us remain compassionate without collapsing. What helps us feel grief without becoming only grief. What helps us act without being devoured by rage. What helps us honor pain without building our whole identity around pain.
To me, this too is part of practicing nonviolence. Not abandoning ourselves. Not abandoning others. Not letting the loudest wound narrate the whole story. Not confusing numbness with strength.
May, in so many places, is a month of emergence. Roots deepen. Shoots rise. Blossoms risk unfurling themselves into view.
Growth does not happen through denial. It happens through conditions that allow life to continue. So perhaps this month asks:
What helps you remember what is sacred in you?
What helps you stay awake without drowning?
What steadies your nervous system enough to remain loving?
What cannot be colonized within you?
And if you are reading this in relative safety, may that safety not end with you.
May it become generosity.
May it become witness.
May it become prayer.
May it become action.
May it become care for those carrying too much.
May you tend what is deepest in you. May you use it well.
Much love to you and your spirit,
Sara
P.S. However this letter meets you, may it offer one small thread of steadiness for the days ahead.
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